


Dust in Our Lungs

by grandfatherclock



Series: Star Trek AU [1]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Star Trek Fusion, F/M, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:02:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22075912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grandfatherclock/pseuds/grandfatherclock
Summary: Jester asks Caleb to play chess with her in her room. It's not the first time Caleb has been asked to do this, by a superior officer.Basically—a Star Trek AU.
Relationships: Jester Lavorre/Caleb Widogast, Nott & Caleb Widogast
Series: Star Trek AU [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1589062
Comments: 16
Kudos: 147





	Dust in Our Lungs

**Author's Note:**

> The trigger warnings deal specifically with abuse Caleb suffered through from Trent Ikithon.
> 
> This AU is intended to be with several parts, each self-contained and in this universe <3

Caleb audibly swallows, staring at himself in the mirror.

It's not such a big deal, Jester said. She would simply like to play chess with him. Chess with the captain of the Mist. Master Ikithon—and he can hear the insistent hum of Nott as she sprayed him with the hypospray, taking care of the symptoms of the residuum experimentation that crop up even now, years later, saying, _He's not your master anymore, Caleb, he's not_ —told him that activities of leisure between commanding officers and those of lesser stations is normal, is encouraged even, that he _really could relax your shoulders, Bren_. Voice dripping with a knowingness Caleb—no, Bren, no, _Caleb_ —didn't know what to do with.

Caleb exhales through his teeth, and cards his fingers through his hair. It's growing out longer than Master Ikithon preferred it. Jester isn't like that, he tells himself, as he runs his hands over his robes befitting his station for any hint of a crease. A sharp blue that would befit a chief science officer. Black trousers, a sharp contrast to the blue he's been told brings out his eyes. He thinks about how far away he is from Zemnia, and how from the trajectory of the ship, as he moves to Jester's room he'll be taking every new step farther away from his home planet.

Farther away from his teacher, who resides in a tower that dominates over the jewel of Zemnia, Rexxentrum itself.

 _Relax your shoulders, Bren_.

Caleb doesn't know how hard he's digging his fingers into his palm until Nott is knocking on his door. The sudden thudding blinks him into awareness, looking at that placid and demure smile in his reflection, the kind Master Ikithon liked, the kind Master Ikithon trained into him, cold fingers on his cheeks and lips as he taught Bren the right expression to make to make a stranger relax their goddamn fucking shoulders. His breathing is quiet, he's learned to make his breathing quiet over the years, and the pain in his palms where the nails dig in-in- _in_ is dull, a nice and dragging thought that entices his brain away from other images coalescing in his head.

" _Caleb_ ," Nott shrieks, continuing to thud until Caleb looks away from the mirror and opens presses necessary commands into the prompting device to open the doors fully. She has a huge smile on her face, holding a bag in her hands. "If I'd known you were going on a _date_ with Jester, I would've had more little things here and there, but—" The smile on her face slowly retracts, and Caleb wonders what she sees on his face. She walks over to him slowly, and her hand reaches up, to gently grip Caleb's own. Her ears flap a little as she forces the fingers out, until the dull pain is deadening like an old skin layer of a snake. Her green skin looks warm, like home, in the artificial light. "What's wrong?"

His first impulse is to lie. It isn't particularly shocking, he and Nott are incredibly close but they are brought together by all their damned lies. Nott would understand, if he were to fabricate, she would understand perhaps the most out of anyone he knows, anyone else at Starfleet, anyone else on the Mist. Anyone else who _breathes_.

He wants to lie.

He closes his eyes, and thinks for a moment about his therapist, whom he has yet to schedule an appointment with this month. "Jester invited me," he said, his voice a little thin as Nott gently pulls him to his bed, clamouring for the spot beside him. Her legs are too short for her feet to touch the floor as she sits, and Caleb smiles weakly at them for a moment before forcing himself to look at Nott somewhere between her left eye and her nose. “In her private room.” His throat feels dry. Nott looks at him uncomprehending for a moment, and Caleb doesn’t think he can do this, doesn’t think he can explain all the ways that his wretched head and wretched lips and wretched hands ruin things for him, ruin _good_ things, _innocent_ things, _perfect_ things—

“Oh,” Nott says after a moment, and Caleb wants to look away, he _does_ , except Nott is reaching for his hands and Nott is smiling crookedly and Nott’s thumb is running over his palm in little circles. It’s grounding, the touch of her rough green skin a more pleasant sensation than that mind-numbing buzzing he feels under his skin, under his smile _as_ he smiles, lips pulling wider and wider and wider before Nott is crawling onto his lap, pulling him into an embrace. They sit in silence for a while, before Nott begins to talk, ears flapping as she tells him all about the new little weapon she’s tinkering with, about how to shoot weaponized beams through the vacuum of space, right up until Caleb is raising his hands and hugging her back, asking her soft-spoken questions that she rants her answers in retort to.

Some time later, she says, “You don’t have to play chess with her.” Her voice is firm as she pulls back a little, patting his cheek. Her eyes are a little nervous, and she exhales through her needle-sharp teeth. “The two of us, we don’t have to do anything anymore.”

Nott understands. Nott was forced to help a torturer too, though Caleb doesn’t like to think that he himself was _forced_ to do anything. He wanted the surgery, welcomed Trent’s touch on his skin, welcomed the straps as they put them on him, experiment after experiment recorded as Trent watched him squirm with each impact the electrocution had on him. Had on the crystals they watched on their monitors, pulsing in the imaging and pulsing in his _arms_ , his arms were _bleeding_ , and he thinks for a moment whether in another life Nott might’ve been in that room, forced to wipe the blood off his skin with a rag as she was kept hostage by cruel sadists.

It’s hard to associate Master— _Trent_ —with sadist.

“I want to play chess with her,” Caleb says. “I… I think I do.” And that’s what scares him, is that he wanted to go to Trent’s room for private lessons, where Trent would check on his residuum scars and help him wrap the bandages properly. Trent would talk about Zemnian history with him, a pleased quirk to his lips as Caleb demonstrated all the ways he kept ahead of his class, which would soon curve down as Caleb fell short on one of the various little topics of conversation he had pre-arranged. Any good spy is good at improvisation, reading the room, skirting by, distracting when their knowledge fell short _after all, Bren_ … “And I,” he’s gasping, but it doesn’t feel like a gasp. His voice feels modulated. “I wanted to chess w-with him too, I wanted…”

Nott is silent for a moment. Caleb blinks, and realizes Nott has been silent for _many_ moments, just rubbing his back as she embraces him. “You want to see her, right?” She peers at Caleb, head cocked to the side as she watches the micro expressions come and leave the intricacies of his face. Caleb tries to keep his expression open, this isn’t supposed to hurt, _this isn’t supposed to hurt_ , and Nott chews on her lower lip. Caleb is honestly surprised that she’s found a way to do it without causing her skin to break into blood, into leaking red. Though, he thinks, his heart expanding a little in his chest as Nott sits back on his lap and crosses her arms with her expression contemplative, if anyone could manage he thinks it would be her. “How about in the common room?”

The common room. Trent would never meet him in a common room. Behind closed doors, it had to be behind closed doors… Caleb exhales through his teeth and gives Nott the weakest smile. “She’s the Captain, Schatz.” He says the Zemnian term of endearment fondly, and runs a hand through her hair, fixing up way the loose strands string into a messy knot in her hair. “It would be… inappropriate, and I don’t…” He pauses, and tries to verbalize the waves of messy thoughts that keep playing out in her head. _Don’t want her to treat me differently. Don’t want to be a problem._

_Don’t want to ruin this, whatever this is, even if I don’t deserve it, even though I’ll just ruin it some other way—_

“I can ask for you,” Nott says, and her eyes narrow at Caleb’s jaw tensing. “Caleb,” she says, and she puts a hand on his cheek. “You know how you talk to the important people and get me the stuff I need for my inventions?”

Ah. Yes. Caleb blinks, remembering all the various requests Nott sent him before she filed, which he edited for the right turns of phrases, the two of them sitting by a screen as they figured out which of their contacts would be the most likely to have any interest in financing Nott’s newest scheme, though she would insist that some light theft remain an option.

She gives him a small smile, watching him tenderly. “I can ask for you, like you ask for me all the time.” She leans close and gives him a big, wet kiss on his cheek, a slight _smack_ sound as she pulls back. Caleb closes his eyes and gives her a wide and genuine smile, raising his hand to touch his skin where her lips touched him. “Say yes, Caleb.”

He thinks about Zemnia, and how the ship from its position and velocity is moving farther and farther away, all the damned time. Rexxentrum is famed for its towers, a celebration of ingenuity and gravity-breaking scientific discovery that makes the planet known all over as a hub for research and enterprise.

He thinks about how buildings don’t mean fucking shit out here in space, where it is just him, and Nott, and the rest of the crew who despite not really understanding Caleb’s unique ways seem to… rather like him. At least a little.

Just him, and Nott, and the crew, and… and Jester.

He thinks tenderly of her freckled skin and Nicodrani accent, lilting over words and always making them better. _Nott_ , she says, quickly and succinctly, enunciating the _tt_ lovingly. _Cayleb_ , dragging out the _a_ like she might not get another chance to breathe his name ever again.

And he says her name strangely, too. Murmurs it, softly like he’s continually giving her a chance not to hear it. She always does, and she cocks her head to the side when she sees him, wavy blue hair rippling over one shoulder. Jester. _Jes-ter_. He wants to say yes.

The _Ja_ he manages out his throat, nearly breaking in its one syllable, causes a lovely smile to bloom on Nott’s face, and that nearly convinces him he made the right decision. She reaches out for her bag, pulling out a nice scarf that he knows will flatter his complexion, and just tries to breathe.

* * *

He sits in the common room, and there are other people milling about. Nott sits with Beauregard, who reads a book and talks loudly in Orcish beside her. Nott ignores her, except when Beau pokes her with a pencil that she has otherwise stuck in her ear, causing Nott to shriek out, “I can’t help you _practice_. Just because I’m green doesn’t mean I’m a fucking orc, _Beau_ —”

“Fucking Ioun,” Beau shouts back, causing some others simply trying to enjoy their meal or their conversation to give her annoyed looks back. There are various other books clustered around Beau at the table she shares with Nott, and they are shouting despite being… right beside each other. Nott has various little knobs and buttons and electrical components on her end of the table, holding the ancient gun from the twenty-first century she recovered at their last dig-site, and she gives Beau a dirty look. “Just fucking be supportive, as soon as Caleb is done with his fucking chess, I’ll be out of your goddamn oily hair.”

“I’ll shoot you,” Nott sings, but her gaze is less annoyed and more bright with possibility.

Caleb is sitting with the chessboard pre-arranged. He made sure to space them out evenly on each square, right in the middle as he anticipates Jester’s arrival. It took a good amount of time, and for a moment, as he finally lets go of the final piece on the board, he wonders if Jester might not make it here after all. Nott said she would. _Nott said she would_ , and that she wasn’t disappointed or annoyed or… Caleb swallows, and his throat feels dry. He doesn’t want to think about his expression, he doesn’t want to think about how he’s being difficult, he doesn’t want to think about how he’s being _disappointing_ —

And he startles as the leg of the chair drags against the floor, causing him to look up. Jester is grinning at him, and already talking a mile a minute, and Caleb thinks for a moment that he’s in heaven, before he blinks and looks down, trying to work away the flush playing out like a dance on a stage along his cheeks. “And _Cayleb_ ,” she continues, after a long and torrid rant about how her mother’s client might be at the next planet they port at, and how he expects Jester to bring a present to the Ruby of the Sea, and how _stupid_ he is for thinking her mother would give him a second look after all these years, “you can just, you know.” She grins, and the gold of her uniform suits her well. She has on golden eyeshadow, her uniform with a pretty skirt that swishes with her legs, and it makes Caleb flush, and it makes his thoughts travel down a road that will only lead to complications. “ _Tell_ me you wanna hang out with everyone.”

Caleb rubs his neck awkwardly, and focuses on the feeling of the soft scarf against the pale of his skin. “Es tut mir Leid,” he murmurs, and he’s grateful at the last moment he managed it into something a little louder than a somber whisper. Jester watches him carefully, violet eyes perfect and all-knowing, and Caleb thinks for a moment about how long it’s been since he’s associated the colour with bruises against his pale skin, how violet has overcome him like a flame spreading over sooted wood.

Last night he made the lights in his room flash violet as he felt himself drifting off to sleep, the hue against his room bringing with him a deep sense of calm. That was—unthinkable, just a couple years ago. Impossible.

Jester makes a face, playful as she leans close over the chessboard, watching eyes analyzing the situation, trying to create with it a plan of action. Jester is a… fluid player, not classically trained like Caleb, and it makes her unpredictable. She reaches forward, pink-adorned nails distracting him for a moment as she moves up a pawn where he expected her to move the rook, and she giggles at his expression. “You don’t have to apologize.”

Right, right. Caleb bites his lower lip, and he doesn’t quite know what to say.

Jester hums under her breath, watching his mouth for a moment. The heat only spreads on Caleb’s face. “Cat got your tongue?” she teases. Everyone knows Caleb is the Mist’s local crazy cat lady.

“Tiefling,” he retorts smoothly, and reaches forward, reaches to make his next move. His blackened fingers brush against Jester’s own hand still hovering against the hair, suspended like she might just be a little frozen, and she raises an eyebrow, her lips catching in this wider smile. She doesn’t look at him like she finds him broken, she doesn’t look at him like he needs to be held very delicately, like some innocent little deer in the headlights.

She looks at him like she wants to devour him, but in a way that won’t hurt.

Caleb knows conversations need to be had, Caleb knows if he ever… intends to verbalize some of the things that dance between them in the minutiae of their daily interactions, invisible apart from how his breath catches or her eyebrows wiggle with insinuation, that they need to _talk_. He knows neither of them are amazing at it, not at unadulterated truth. But she listens, and she cares, and that makes all this, and the fact that he really does _want_ all this, less fucking… scary. Less like a bomb waiting to explode. Less like a lesson Master Ikithon is just waiting to teach him.

She hums under her breath, and he listens, for once just enraptured by _her_ and not thinking about where in space Zemnia lies. After all, the moons might orbit around it, and so do satellites. But not the entirety of space.

Not the entirety of space.


End file.
